However, our video index page is searchable. and will be a single page with all links. That is where links to transcripts and other related resources will be placed. It takes about an hour to create a presentation transcript in the format I am using, and about a day to clean it up and polish it.

I will be creating indexes to this material, to make it more accessible for search and study. For the first time, Darden’s keynote is available. The video I’ve seen is high quality and far surpasses the poor audio we had for some presentations (which was still appreciated, people provided what they had.)

Because there is Close Caption working with the videos (at least what I saw), I will also be preparing transcripts.

The first transcript I started with was of Tom Darden, but I happened to complete the Michael Staker transcript first. I will now go back and present the Darden video in the same way. I will also integrate the slides and abstracts, so one will be able to read the transcripts and make sense out of the references to slides.

This process is highly enlightening. In the case of the Staker video, I had already worked extensively on SAV sources, so everything he was saying made sense (and I could more accurately decode the automated transcription text). I had already worked with a draft of Staker’s ICCF-21 paper and Mike McKubre’s presentation at Greccio, which was co-authored with Staker, collecting all the sources. So it’s now all quite clear to me, amazingly so, from being obscure and “hard to understand.”

How to capture a YouTube transcript (general and ICCF-21 specific).

[Below the title is a menu button ( . . . ). Press it and select “Open Transcript.” A window will open with the closed caption transcript. Ctrl-A within that window to highlight it, and Ctrl-C to capture it in your clipboard.] The italicized description worked when I was writing this. I just tried it again, and instead of just selecting the text in the transcript window, it selected much else on the page. To capture just the transcript text I needed to put the cursor at the beginning, maybe select a little text at the beginning — left-mouse-hold at the beginning and then move a little — and then shift-left-click at the end after scrolling to the end. (ctrl-home places the cursor at the beginning of the transcript and ctrl-end places it at the end). Then ctrl-C will copy the selected text.

[Paste this into a word processor or other editor. I found that if it is straight pasted (which includes formatting) into the WordPress visual editor, every line is a link to the video, with the brief transcript for the time shown as the next line.] Again, that’s what I was able to do earlier, and I was unable to reproduce this behavior. So the text doesn’t have the links, those will be introduced in Excel.

At this point the text is useful. If I have this text for a video, I can then proceed to create the WordPress page. The further this is taken, the less work for me.

I copy the youtunr transcript to Excel, to massage that copy into the format I want on the page. The URLs are translated to specific jumps to the specific times, by adding “&t=12m34s” to the URL. (that would be a timestamp for 12:34. My guess is that “h” is used for hours.) The time, from the next line, is moved to the text portion of the “a” tag, and the </a> tag closing is moved to just after the time, leaving the transcript text open, unformatted.

This will give a transcript with the timestamps as links followed by a space and the text.. I then add in the HTML code to display the time in 6 point type, to make it less obtrusive but still readable. Replace {<a} with {<span style=”font-size: 6pt;”><a} (don’t copy the curly braces!) and {</a>} with {</a></span>}. 4 point can be used for this, it is sort-of readable. However, it’s useful to have it be more readable when editing the transcript.

To speed up editing of this into continuous text, paragraphed, I replace all the LF/CR codes (represented in Word search and replace as “^p”) with spaces, so it becomes one huge “paragraph.” Then, editing the transcript, I paragraph it, simply by adding punctuation and a return (“Enter↵”).

The HTML code is then copied back to my WordPress editor.

I clean up the transcript in WordPress. At any time, I can follow a timestamp link to find the exact point in the video. If I press the link just before some text, there it is, quickly. However, because it takes some time for my computer to load the video, when editing, I have WordPress open in one window, and the YouTube video in another, so I can immediately press the stop/run button in the video, and so if I want to adjust the time, usually to go back, I use the YouTube slider and I know what time to go to, approximately, by the displayed link in WordPress.

Once the text is paragraphed, I can add (in word) spacer code, to reduce the space. I’m using ten pixels instead of the default space (which I think is 20 pixels.) I’m using a WordPress shortcode from the Spacer plug-in for that. It’s a little tricky.

The ICCF-21 has the slides available, and the presentations can make much more sense with the slides! I downloaded the slide PDF, renamed it with a simpler but still unique name, and used ILovePDF to convert this to individual JPEG images, Powershell to change the filenames to simple followed by the page number, and then I uploaded the files to the blog domain in a slides directory, uploads/slides, then I used MediatoFTP to register these as images. I used to manually upload all the images within WordPress, which puts them into dated media directories with much longer names. This gives me immediate access from the editor to the slides, searchable by slide number, and the Media facility remembers the last search, so I can just bump the number of to insert the next slide.

So I watch the video again, inserting the slides. The normal place is in the time sequence when the speaker clicks to the next slide. For clarity, I vary this. Some speakers use many slides where another will use one, the many slides each adding something to the display.

I add the slide numbers in Excel when I’m done. It’s too much work to add them when placing the image, and I found that if the slide number is put as a caption, it’s weirdly place. It was much easier to place the slide number as small text just before the image.

You can see the results on two pages at this point: Staker and Storms.

Comments are invited.

Participation is invited.

I cannot imagine a better way to develop deep understanding of CMNS than work like this. To do this work well requires deep attention to detail. If you are unfamiliar with terms, you will become familiar, or you will make mistakes in editing the transcript.

I have the brain of a 74-year old. They must have made some mistake!

It takes more repetition to learn than when I was younger, but I can still learn and the results are little short of amazing, certainly for me!

As to those mistakes, we hope, someone will find and correct them, and we will learn if we pay attention. Making mistakes is generally the fastest way to learn, and any error in these transcripts can be quickly fixed. I am considering putting them on the wiki, which would stand as a working draft.

I see that the following is somewhat redundant to what is above, but, hey, it’s only a paragraph. . . . The Staker and Storms videos are particularly significant now, considering discussions in the community about Super Abundant Vacancies. From working with sources, a presentation in Greccio this year and those two videos, I have enough familiarity with the findings that, to my great surprise, at least one major expert has deferred to my opinion. But I’m certainly not a full expert, just an opinionated reporter who loves to inform my readers as to what exists in sources, so that they can come to their own conclusions. I will report my opinions, sometimes, but they matter much less. Increasingly, they are informed.

The related fields are complex and can take advanced study and training, but, by continual exposure to the material, I become familiar with it.

I learned years ago to notice and drop the “this is too complicated” reaction that creates an obstacle to familiarity.

Our strong tendency is to remember what generates feelings, particularly feelings of dislike, rather than what is actually happening.

I actually don’t “try” to understand, I just keep looking, more or less like a child. Maybe I look something up if it seems interesting.

If I write, I check sources, over and over, I don’t just rely on memory, usually.

Since I have the sources, I cite them. All this can make my writing long. I write polemic in a different way.

I learned electronics and made it into a successful profession, when I was about 30, by having a basic background (but from many years before, obsolete, hey vacuum tube radios!), and then just looking at electronics magazines, and having a work opportunity allowing me to focus and learn some specifics. I did not “study” it.

I learned Arabic by reading the Qur’an in Arabic. (That simply requires learning the symbols, Qur’anic orthography is phonetic. Understanding Arabic came much later, after familiarity was developed. That’s a theme: familiarity.) Again, I did not learn by studying it. The fastest increase in comprehension actually came when I memorized a large chunk of the Qur’an. Before then, when I tried to study Arabic with grammars, etc.., it went in one eye and out the other. (Hah!) Arabic is famously difficult for non-Semitic language natives. But children learn it just as easily as other languages. Familiarity. Once I was familiar with the patterns of the language, the grammars then made far more sense. Otherwise they seemed like a pile of arbitrary rules to memorize.